A child of the fifties

I am not the self-made man
I thought I was.
Led by the nose of my own desire,
driven by the spur of ambition.
I am pinned to the year of my birth,
raw and open to the weather.

I used to think it was sloth
tugging at my ankle
not the hand of an unburied ancestor,
an engine driver on the GWR,
a coach builder at the Austin motor works,
concerned for the family.

I was conceived on a ramble
in the Lickey Hills
in nineteen fifty three
by a wet and disoriented couple.
I am an offspring of rationing
a post-war child.
Hygiene was invented for me.
The skies made safe over England.

				Clapham, 1993

	John Rule, 2004
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